Microbial adherence is one of the impotant determinants of pathogenesis, yet very few adhesins have been identified from fungal pathogens. Experimental characterization of these highly glycosylated surface proteins is an arduous task. It is therefore implicit to have facile methods of selecting adhesin candidates on a proteome-wide level before embarking on for wet-lab toil. The identification of these molecules would provide a foundation towards the development of new strategies for therapeutic intervention against systemic mycoses as well as crop protection.
We have developed a database FAADB which houses the experimentally verified and well-annotated fungal adhesins from several different fungi.
We present here an SVM-based method for the identification of fungal adhesins. The method showed ~87% accuracy in five-fold cross-validation.